Clinic

Domino; 1999

Find it at:

If you've never pondered the source of the rat-at-tat-tat boom-boom ascending from darkened alleyways, know that these sounds emanate not from gunfire, but from an unregistered Liverpudlian Clinic whose surgeons engage in dissections of the by-gone underground influences of America. The execution is primitive, but its intent is logical. The music is elemental, having evolved from the ancestral types that serve as influences to their rough methodology. But a balanced rationale clearly governs Clinic's menacing aural approach. The song title "I.P.C. Subeditors Dictate Our Youth" signifies a blatant call to action against the modern-day bureaucratic mind-control that pervades youth markets both above and below ground. It indicates a deviant sense of purpose that more scrupulous medical practitioners lack.

The surgeon's table has seen the inhumanly savage cut-and-paste of White Light/White Heat-era Velvet Underground with the rhythmic assault of Hal Blaine under Phil Spector's direction. The screams are Spector's own-- the sonic equivalent of studied horror from witnessing organs being spilled upon the sterile tile floor.

The technique is concerned with brutal distortions of aesthetics. "Porno" aches and moans orgasmically to a warbled throbbing of keyboard and guitar. It's topped with indecipherable vocal incantations meant to terrorize those that have trouble grasping the deconstruction of rhythm within the context of terrible sex.

An insidious affinity for indirect discourse is discernible in the otherwise unintelligible vocal approach. "D.P." and "D.T." are violent odes to sonic aggression, exemplified by the less sophisticated punk rockers of the '60s and '70s. "Punk," having become a loaded political term, is applied here in the same way an anesthetic is administered for inducing numbness in wounded patients.

The knives-out approach of these medical knaves belies the sadistic glee with which they patch their subjects together. The gruesome freshness of their product indicates a fruitful decomposition of influences from within-- the appropriation of life-blood from yesterday's walking dead imbues their macabre creations with mortal verisimilitude and stylistic panache. Shrouded in a skeletal grasp of melody, the most shocking prospect is the widespread acceptance of their unsound practices, and the slow unfolding of their message through the easily misconstrued language of rhythm and dissonance. Subversion has never sounded so palpably suicidal.